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Senior Judge Ronald Whyte's ruling in the Hynix case was bizarre anyway... I'm glad it got overturned. (He had concluded that Rambus wasnâ(TM)t anticipating litigation when the shredding took place.) Under Whyte's ruling the bar for being convicted as a spoilator of evidence was set impossibly high.

Wait, so the penultimate ruling (the one before this one) was in favor of Rambus?

Also, I thought the courts were supposed to view a party as guilty by default if they destroy evidence.

Yes to your question.

No to your destruction statement. They are not "Guilty" by default unless they were required to retain thedocuments. Rambus would be required to retain these documents and the 1200+ email backup tapesif they were planning litigation, or where a reasonable person could forsee litigation.Since they were clearly planning litigation as early as 1998, they can't come along in 2006and say that litigation was unanticipated.

Still, you have to wonder why this company was in such a rush to flush.

Well, it was around that time when my own company started pushing more on records retention. Probably one of those general management trends of the day - probably some companies got creamed in discovery (consider that this wasn't long after the whole Microsoft email fiasco).

Love all the conflicting management recommendations that this led to. Legal would send out emails like "meet in person, rather than using email" and finance would send out "use electronic tools like email instead of having expensive in-person meetings."

I think the way it ended up shaking out is that most bottom-line employees use email, and most high-level managers that make the kinds of decisions that get companies sued tend to do it all in meetings without minutes.

Legally it is best for a company to have a policy and stick to it - what gets you in trouble is when one division shreds on a perfect schedule, and another doesn't. Then if the first gets sued the second gets used as an example to suggest that the first was planning something nefarious. That may or may not be true.

I almost wonder if this is something that should be the subject of government guidelines. I know that in many industries particular types of documentation have a retention schedule mandated by law (almost always short compared to most litigation). When you think about technology - is there really any reason to ever throw out a document? You could probably build a machine that sits next to a photocopier and which coverts a document to PDF, does OCR, uploads it to a server, and then dumps into a shredder. The server could then do deduplication and index everything (where it originated, where it was tossed, etc). Your document management system would send clean electronic PDFs to the same server, so in the ideal case where the document was printed and then tossed the scanned version never gets retained unless it has writing on it.

Ironically Rambus had implemented such a policy recommended by an outside legal counsel at the time. It was 'sticking to this policy' that caused them to hold the shred day clean up / pizza party that got them into the trouble. One of the verdicts in Delaware which was overturned had previously resulted in forfeiture of their patent rights entirely.

Unfortunately that sum is only half the story. The dollar was worth more then and those companies could have been benefiting from its use for years. And they'd have been selling a cheaper unencumbered product.

The real damages in this case are immense, probably to the entire industry but certainly to these companies. Damages our court system will never address.

Okay I have an Earth shattering new product. I have the backing to produce it but I can't aford the lawyers to defend against impossibly vague patents. Do I risk all my cash starting the company assuming some one will sue me and take it all away or do I invest in stable stocks. Hmmmm. Is there really a choice here? It's like the auto industry shutting out the independent car makers. Do you have any idea how hard it is for a small car company to get a VIN number? Corporate America can whine about regulations

This case is about hardware patents, not software ones. The economics controlling those are difference.

For one thing, the costs of producing chips is so high, that if you can afford those, you can afford to go to court over patents. The main problem with software patents is that it costs your own time for so many months in your mom's basement (which amounts to about $70K if you count lost wages, less if you just count the food and lodging you consume) to produce a decent, market worthy software product. Compare that with the ~$5 million it costs to defend against a patent suite, and you see how that is a problem. It costs $1 million just to create a tape-out for ASIC production, which is just one part of the production chain, and does not include the development and testing costs.

This particular case is not about "dummy" patents. It is about a party signing RAND and participating in a committee that develops new technology, while at the same time discreetly patenting that very same technology. This is a simple case of misdirection and theft. The patents in this case are just the tool with which this misdirection took place.

The main problem with software patents is that it costs your own time for so many months in your mom's basement (which amounts to about $70K if you count lost wages, less if you just count the food and lodging you consume) to produce a decent, market worthy software product.

Someone should let Sergei Brin, Bill Gates, Gil Schwed and not so few others that. They all started with miniscule software companies paying their initial employees mostly with equity, while these companies are, today, worth billions.

That is the wrong question for this thread. The right question is how many real, marketable software products that come from Mom's basement (or equivalent funding strain on the individual) are in danger of never making it due to inability to protect themselves from junk patents

The main problem with software patents is that it costs your own time for so many months in your mom's basement... to produce a decent, market worthy software product. Compare that with the ~$5 million it costs to defend against a patent suite, and you see how that is a problem.

I don't think that's the biggest problem with software patents. I know we don't all agree on why software patents are bad, but I think the single biggest problem with patents (especially software patents) is this:

The patent system is intended to be an exchange. Inventors describe fully how their invention works and in return they are granted a temporary monopoly on its production. In exchange for that monopoly, the public receives valuable information about how new inventions work so that the invention c

I just love how discussions on/. veer off topic so quickly. I never said it was the biggest problem. I just said it was a problem, and in the context of the poster to which I was replying, the most relevant one.

Just for the record, I am not against all patents. I am against areas where patents don't make sense and don't work. I believe the principle behind patents (which you have, correctly, outlined) is sound in certain fields.

Software patents have practical implementation problems (such as people succeed

Seeing as Rambus the old school patent troll is still in the news a decade later, puts a smile on my face. Time to dig up some 8 to10 year slashdot stories about Rambus suing any company that made ram back in the day.....

1. The infringers claimed RMBS did not invent the technology. It is now law that they did.2. The infringers claimed there was prior art. It is now law that there was not.3. The infringers claimed there was fraud at JEDEC. It is now law that there was not (by RMBS).4. The infringers claimed they did not infringe. It is now law that they did and continue to infringe.5. Now the infringers are admitting 1-4 above but claim they should not have to pay for the use of the technology they have been stealin